Comforting Objects
On Carmen Argote's fiery works made from foam, cochineal, lemon, and more 🔥🪲🍋
I met Carmen Argote for the first time over the internet. It was the summer of 2020, when a good number of days were spent watching my newly mobile one-year-old while also trying (and failing) to pay attention in one Zoom after another. It wasn’t long before I developed jaw pain from holding my face in a self-consciously neutral-but-sunny position, desperate to avoid the RBF that I am undoubtedly exhibiting as I type these very words.
Active Cultures, an LA-based non-profit focused on art and food, was hosting a series of recorded conversations called “Food Material,” and invited me, as the founding editor of their publishing platform, Digest, to interview Carmen in her studio for Instagram. We talked about her long walks around a city eerily quieted by Covid, walks that yielded many new works, including prints (and a very long scroll) made with Rx bars and pizza slices. The oils in both foods create Rorschach-like grease stains that morph, when outlined with crayon, into a private symbology. As Carmen put it in her notes at the time, “In walking, I feel that I digest the city, understanding its energy as a process of taking it in and processing it slowly.”
Since moving back to LA in 2021, I’ve engaged quite a bit with Carmen’s work, going deeper for ARTnews on Carmen’s affinity for foodstuffs — avocado, guava leaves, lemon juice, strawberry syrup, cochineal — as artistic materials, and writing for Artforum about her solo show at the ICA LA in 2023, which included sculptures made from banana peels and other organic matter. Given my strong affinity for her work and the incredibly thoughtful way she moves through the world, I was only too delighted when Carmen asked me to write a text for her first solo gallery show in New York, which opens this Thursday, July 9, at Silverlens. With the gallery’s permission, I’m sharing that text here, punctuated by behind-the-scenes and work-in-progress images Carmen graciously sent me.
Enjoy the sneak peek below!
Carmen Argote: Soft Perimeter, Silverlens, New York
For Carmen Argote’s debut solo gallery show in 2010, she exhibited a 720-square-foot carpet that once covered the floors of her childhood home in Los Angeles, hanging it from the ceiling in the manner of a monumental tapestry. She painted most of the carpet white, leaving a wide strip of the original chestnut brown around the edges; over time, stains from years past bled through the paint, like memories slowly returning to the surface of consciousness.
Many of the formal, material, and conceptual concerns of 720 Sq. Feet: Household Mutations return, refined and elaborated, in the work gathered together for “Soft Perimeter,” Argote’s first solo gallery show in New York. The sculptural object that gives the exhibition its title, Soft perimeter of home (2026), similarly maps a domestic interior: the hybrid home and studio the adult Argote shares with her mother (a frequent collaborator) and a handful of chickens (also collaborators), a space where art making is just one activity among many that sustain the artist’s daily life. Every nook and cranny is filled with personal effects commingled with works-in-progress; it’s this premium on available space that led Soft perimeter of home to wind up coiled on Argote’s bed, taking on the loose infinity shape that it now occupies on the gallery floor. What once traced the edges of the artist’s home has collapsed in self-embrace, its twists and softness calling up the body more acutely than the rigid geometry of architecture.
The foam guts of Soft perimeter of home are externalized and made grotesque in a series of objects, all from 2026, made in part from a foraged foam mattress that Argote originally thought had once belonged to a romantic partner.
Building on her earlier “comforting objects,” small figural sculptures of bundled and knotted organic and found materials, the more recent foam works also employ braiding and binding to create dense forms, but in this case they evoke matter metabolized and expelled—matter of the body rather than a surrogate for the body.
Unlike the earlier comforting objects, these works are unified by Argote’s use of cochineal, a deep red dye harvested from insects, whose usage dates back to the Mayans and Aztecs. When mixed with lemon juice, the dye shifts to vibrant orange, scarlet, gray, and violet, a viscerally intense palette with associations of sun, blood, passion, and death. A number of titles in the series—Matchstick, Please fireweed, Yes Firebasket—reference fire, a force of nature both destructive and sanctifying. Where the comforting objects strongly relate to Argote’s larger project of re-mothering her inner child, the more recent sculptures suggest chemical transformation, nodding to the 2025 wildfires that forever changed the physical and psychological landscape of Los Angeles, and willing, through forms compacted and enclosed, their containment. Twin works on paper, where is the match that sparked the entire terrain (2026), extend the impulse toward control, with even brushstrokes of crimson cochineal creating an allover field of color that envelops the viewer, containing us in the bodily and psychic experience of encounter.
Cochineal, itself derived from a non-human body, constitutes the corporeal throughline of “Soft Perimeter.” Argote imagines the dye as “almost like a body,” behaving similarly to “all kinds of secretions, like hormones and different chemicals, which shift and change our mood.”1 Me at Market (2020), a monumentally scaled work on linen, embodies both the excess of secretion and the magic of material metamorphosis. The work is narrow and impossibly long, much like the intestinal Soft perimeter of home, but with vastly different appearances on recto and verso, not unlike a body.
The “front” is dotted with a grid of linen pockets—similar to those sewn on the artist’s signature jumpsuits—that Argote filled with cochineal and lemon juice, allowing the liquid to bleed downward, leaving behind neat lines of pigment that link one pocket to the next and so on. The “back” of the work is its more chaotic underbelly, where dye and acid swirl in dark mottled pools, beautiful and gruesome all at once. Argote’s orderly pockets—cut and sewn by her mother—suggest holding, harboring, and keeping; but sometimes what is meant to be carried cannot be contained, instead seeping outward, inward, and through, changing everything in its path.
Thank you for reading! Soft Perimeter opens at Silverlens, New York, on July 9 and remains on view through August 1, 2026. Don’t miss it!
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Interview with the author, May 14, 2026.
That is such a fascinating way to think about dye! Carmen's work is amazing.